1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates, generally, to computer translation of a source language into a target language. More particularly, it relates to a machine translation that takes cultural subtleties into consideration when making a translation.
2. Description of the Prior Art
U.S. Pat. No. 5,224,040 to the present inventor (sometimes hereinafter referred to as "the first patent"), discloses a machine for translating a source language, such as Chinese, into a target language, such as English. Since Chinese sentences are written in strings of characters, and since the characters combine in different ways to produce different words, the method disclosed in that earlier patent includes the steps of inputting a Chinese character string, segmenting that string to identify character groups that form words and idioms, and producing a raw translation of those words into the target language.
In the second generation of the machine, disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,384,702 to the present inventor (sometimes hereinafter referred to as "the second patent"), grammar rules and self-correction rules are applied to the raw translation to polish it.
However, the syntactic structure and sentence composition of a source language reflects the cultural influences that worked on the source language during the many centuries of its development. The same observation applies to a target language as well. Thus, there is usually a considerable gap between the syntactic structure and sentence composition between any two source and target languages. The machines and methods disclosed in the first and second patents included no means whereby such differences were taken into account. As a result, even after the raw sentence produced in the machine disclosed in the first patent was polished in the machine disclosed in the second patent by the identification of grammar markers therewithin and the application of grammar rules and self-correction rules thereto, it was still possible to obtain a polished sentence that lacked the syntactic structure and sentence composition of the target language, i.e., the grammar rules and self-correction rules alone were not sufficient to bridge the gap between the respective syntactic structures and sentence compositions of languages lacking a common cultural background.
What is needed, then, is a third generation of machines that takes the differing syntactic structures and sentence compositions of source and target languages into consideration when improving a raw translation so that the polished translation substitutes the syntactic structures and sentence compositions of the target language for the syntactic structures and sentence compositions of the source language.
No prior art translation computer has the capability of converting a sentence in a source language having the syntax and sentence structure of the source language into a target language sentence having the syntax and structure of the target language. The conventional wisdom has always been that such a feat would be possible only if all possible sentences in the source language were matched in a computer memory with a predetermined counterpart sentence in the target language. In other words, human linguists would be required to match all possible sentences in the respective languages, and the computer would then simply produce the target sentence that matched the source sentence. Obviously, since the number of possible sentences in any language is infinite, such a scheme has long been understood to be impractical.
No general purpose translation machine heretofore known is capable of translating an infinite number of grammatically correct source language sentences into an infinite number of grammatically correct target language sentences where the respective languages include differing syntax's and sentence structures.
Moreover, in view of the prior art when considered as a whole at the time the present invention was made, it was not obvious to those of ordinary skill in this art how such a general purpose translation machine could be provided.